MXF, the Material eXchange Format, is a container format for professional digital video and audio/sound media which is defined by a set of SMPTE standards. SMPTE, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, was founded in 1916 as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers.
MXF is a “container” or “wrapper” format which supports a number of different streams of coded “essence”, encoded in any of a variety of video and audio/sound compression formats, together with a metadata wrapper which describes the material contained within the MXF file. MXF has full timecode and metadata support, and is intended as a platform-agnostic stable standard for future professional video and audio/sound applications. MXF was developed to carry a subset of the Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) data model, under a policy known as the Zero Divergence Directive (ZDD). This theoretically enables MXF/AAF workflows between Non-Linear Editing (NLE) systems using AAF and cameras, servers, and other devices using MXF. There are 2 basic types of MXF clips: The first are those where the essence (media) is actually stored in the same file as the metadata that refers to it. These files are said to have internal essence. The second type is that where the essence is stored in separate files to the metadata, and these files are said to have external essence. In this case, the decoder first reads the metadata file, and that metadata points to the files in which the individual pieces of essence are stored.
XDCAM MXF from SONY™ is supported by ADOBE™ After Effects, ADOBE™ Premiere Pro, APPLE™ Final Cut Pro X, AUTODESK™ Smoke, AVID™, CAPELLA SYSTEMS™, DALET™, EVS™, IMAGINE COMMUNICATIONS CORPORATION™, OMNEON™, QUANTEL™, RHOZET™, SONY™ Vegas Pro, SORENSON™ Squeeze, TELESTREAM™ FlipFactory, GRASSVALLEY™ EDIUS, GRASSVALLEY™ K2, and MERGING TECHNOLOGIES™ VCube. P2 MXF by PANASONIC™ is supported by ADOBE™ After Effects, ADOBE™ Premiere Pro, APPLE™ Final Cut Pro X, AUTODESK™ Smoke, AVID™, DALET™, EVS™, GRASSVALLEY™ EDIUS, and GRASSVALLEY™ K2. IKEGAMI™ offers camcorders capable of recording in MXF wrapper using AVID™ DNxHD video encoding at 145 Mbit/second, as well as MPEG-2 video encoding at 50 Mbit/second 4:2:2 long-GOP and 100 Mbit/second I-frame. GOP stands for Group of Pictures, consisting of I (independently coded), P (predictively coded using one picture), and B (bipredictive coded using two pictures) frames. In 2010, CANON™ released its new lineup of professional file-based camcorders. The recording format used in these camcorders incorporates MPEG-2 video with bitrates up to 50 Mbit/second and 16-bit linear PCM audio/sound in what CANON™ has called XF codec. CANON™ claims that its flavor of MXF is fully supported by major NLE systems including ADOBE™ Premiere, APPLE™ Final Cut Pro X, AVID™ Media Composer, and GRASSVALLEY™ EDIUS.
MXF is used as the audio and video packaging format for Digital Cinema Package (DCP). It is also used regarding STANAG (NATO STANdardized AGreement) specification documents. The file extension for MXF files is “.mxf”. The Macintosh file type code registered with APPLE™ for MXF files is “mxf”, including a trailing space. The Internet would have “application/mxf”. CinemaDNG (intended by ADOBE™ and others to be an open file format for digital cinema files) exploits MXF as one of its options for holding a sequence of raw video images. Blockchain technology is finding increasing use for insuring the error-free transfer of information. A hash algorithm takes input and converts it to, at a very high probability, a unique series of digits called a hash digest. The more digits in this hash digest, the less likely that there would be a collision, where different input had the same hash digest. The hash function demonstrates the avalanche effect, where a tiny change in the input, no matter how small, creates a significant change to the output digest. This patent disclosure melds the MFX format and Blockchain hash technology, to provide a standards-compatible implementation.